“Networks are a powerful mathematical representation of various datasets and systems. An important computational tool to study and extract information from large complex networks is to partition it into groups of nodes with similar connectivity,” lead author Ms Liu said.

“The surprising finding for the blog network suggests that the source blogs, being heavily referenced, are not tightly connected with each other while receiver blogs are less referenced but highly active in referencing others and strongly connected with each other.

“Our research presents a new way of studying network organisation and, at this stage, we can only speculate on the why and what their effects are on social media, but our plan for the future is to go deeper into this question.”